GNOME 3.10 is expected in September and some of its newest features are beginning to appear in the 3.9 development branch. Version 3.9.2 is expected this week and Matthias Clasen takes us on a little tour.

First up is GNOME Music. The "geekiest Ogre alive" has been blogging of the progress of GNOME music for that last several months with the latest one last month saying developers have reached the end of phase one in development. Seif Lotfy said, "We can now browse our albums, artists and songs (no playlists yet) and play them." Clausen said of it, "it looks fresh and promising. And it plays my music already."

Another new app making its debut is GNOME Maps. As it sounds, it’s a map viewer that Clasen says, "does not do much yet beyond loading maps and showing me my location. But that will soon change."

Another potentially handy app was previewed in GNOME 3.8. Bijiben is a note-taking application on steriods. "For 3.10, it will be much more feature-complete, data exchange with tomboy and online accounts is planned."

Some other planned features are:

* Gitg is a git repository viewer, recently rewritten in vala. * Totem is also getting a face-lift as well as many common GNOME GUI elements * "The GNOME shell status area may be getting a design update" * Automatic Extension Updates * Flickr support in Photos * Better Wayland support * Integration of Zimbra into GNOME